Twisted Metal (36 page)

The other women were now staring at her. Susan didn’t care any more.

‘Th . . . Thank you,’ she said.

‘That’s okay,’ said Nettie. ‘Although I must admit, I don’t think I could do as good a job as you. There’s good weaving here, Susan. I’ve watched you weave minds too. You’re very deft.’

‘Thank you,’ said Susan, then she remembered herself. ‘Though I think you’re being too modest. That’s a nice body you have.’

‘You’re only being polite,’ said Nettie. ‘If I were that good at twisting metal, that’s what I would be doing. Instead they have me lecturing you all on how to make minds.’ And at that she gave such a wistful look, it made Susan wonder. Would she really rather be in Susan’s position? And a thought arose: had Nettie
ever
made children for herself? Would this lecturing be Nettie’s only contribution to the twisting of a mind? What a sad, sad thought.

Nettie pulled wire from a nearby reel and began to knit with her fingers. Susan sat back and just relaxed, for the first time in ever so long. The glow of the fire, the chattering of the other women, the sudden feeling of companionship. Her right hand stirred on the soot and grease of the floor. She found herself drawing a shape: a circle, then a smaller circle on the top. Maybe it was the sudden sense of relaxation, maybe it was the realization that she had so little left to lose, but Susan asked the question that had been puzzling her for so long.

‘Nettie,’ she asked, ‘what does this mean?’

It took Nettie a moment, as she clumsily knitted away, to realize what Susan was pointing to. When she saw the shape her fingers froze for a moment. Then she continued to knit as if nothing had happened.

‘Rub that out,’ she said, conversationally. ‘Do you want to get us both killed?’

Susan did as she was told, the worn plastic on her hand scuffing the grease and swarf into dirty flurries.

‘But why? You drew that shape yourself. I saw you!’

Nettie was obviously distressed, was doing her best to hide it.

‘Susan, this is Artemis City! We follow Nyro’s philosophy here! The Book of Robots is heresy! There is no philosophy but Nyro’s!’

Susan gazed at the robot. ‘But you drew the shape. So did Maoco O and . . .’

‘Don’t mention their names! I don’t want to know!’ She continued to knit, agitatedly, and for a moment Susan wondered what her left arm would feel like when Nettie had finished. How long before she could politely knit herself a new muscle?

That didn’t matter now. She wanted to know about the Book of Robots. ‘But why do people keep telling me about this!’

‘You mean you don’t know?’ said Nettie. ‘But you bear the mark!’

‘What mark?’

‘It’s woven into you. You built it into your body! Can’t you see it?’

‘See what?’

Nettie looked at her, puzzled. ‘Have I made a mistake?’ she murmured. ‘No, it’s there! Don’t you see, the way you have shaped yourself? How you resemble me? It’s subtle, but unmistakeable!’

Susan looked from Nettie to herself. She couldn’t see anything, just two robots.

‘The mark is all around us!’ said Nettie. ‘I can see it written in the world, in the moon! It’s so obvious. You and I bear the mark!’

‘I can’t see it.’

‘But why not? Your mother wove the pattern into your mind, so that you would make yourself as you do—’

‘I can’t see it! I told you! I can’t see anything!’

The other women were all looking in their direction now. Susan pretended to take an interest in the electromuscle that Nettie was knitting. She asked questions on her technique, as if anyone else would want to imitate Nettie’s poor knitting. The other women returned to their work.

‘Listen,’ said Nettie. ‘I don’t understand why you can’t see it, but the mark is on you. The knowledge must be in you somewhere, you just haven’t seen it yet. You need to search through your memories. It will be there somewhere, you need to recognize it.’

‘How will I recognize it?’

‘I don’t know – it’s obvious to me. Listen, this is what I know. Some time, a long time ago, the first robots were made. They had a purpose, a reason for existence, a philosophy that was woven into them. When they made their children, they wove the same philosophy into their minds. And their children wove it into
their
children’s minds. But, in time, as the generations went on and the years passed, the mothers stopped weaving in the full knowledge. They substituted other knowledge, for reasons that no one understands.’

I was right
, thought Susan.
You never did twist minds. Any mother would understand why the full knowledge was not passed on. Any mother would add something new to the weave in order to give her child an advantage in life. They wouldn’t hesitate to discard something that would hold their child back
.

Nettie continued: ‘And so the original knowledge was diluted and broken apart, and gradually the robots diverged into different states and different beliefs. But, even so, some knowledge is still passed on even now; some few fragments are woven into the minds of children, along with other memories. Those memories contain the sign’ – Nettie’s finger made the symbol of the dot on the circle – ‘woven into them. We few who carry those memories are charged with the task of assembling the true knowledge back into the whole. Of rediscovering our true reason for being.’

Susan was silent for a moment, thinking.

‘But that’s not right,’ she said finally. ‘Robots weren’t built. We evolved, just like all the other life on this planet. There is no purpose, no reason for our existence. We just are!’

Nettie smiled sadly. ‘You can’t see it at the moment, Susan. Search your memories. It’s in there somewhere. You’ll see that I’m right.’

Susan didn’t think so, but she didn’t feel confident enough to disagree.

‘Tell me about the Book of Robots.’

‘Ah,’ said Nettie, pausing to examine her progress with the electromuscle. A loop of wire had popped out, further up the pattern. She tried to pull it back into place. ‘The Book,’ said Nettie, absently.

Suddenly, she seemed to remember where she was and took a look around the room, but no one now seemed to be paying them any attention. ‘Well,’ she continued. ‘Some people hold that assembling all the fragments of memory will be an impossible task. They are too diffuse and too much has been forgotten.’ She nodded. ‘I must admit, I can understand their point of view, but I am not so defeatist. My mother made me that way.’

Susan nodded.

‘But there are those who believe something else to be true. They hold that the memories are lost and that we should not waste our time trying to bring them together again. Instead, we should search for the Book of Robots, the design for the original robots. It contains the pattern in which the original minds were woven: the philosophy, the rules, everything. Find the book, they say, and we will know our purpose.’

‘Okay,’ said Susan, ‘where should we look?’

Again, Nettie drew a circle on the air.

‘Large circle,’ she said, ‘our planet of Penrose. Small circle,’ she drew a smaller circle on top, ‘Kusch. The continent on the top of the world. The birthplace of the robots. That is where we should be looking for the Book of Robots.’

Karel and Kavan

‘What’s your name, driver?’

Karel’s hands tightened around the brakes at the surprise of again hearing a voice. It didn’t matter, the train wasn’t moving. He had sat waiting in this valley for hours now, just watching the wet snowflakes melting into a slushy mess on the rails ahead.

‘I asked, what’s your name?’

‘Karel,’ he replied.

‘Karel, my name is Kavan. Do you know who I am?’

‘You’re the leader of the Artemis troops. You led the invasion of Turing City.’

‘That’s right. And you’re the robot who drove the train from which all those troops mysteriously disappeared. Tell me about it.’

‘I’ve already said all there is to say.’

Silence. Wet snowflakes falling on rock.

‘You’re very brave for a robot whose coil I could have crushed at a moment’s notice.’

‘I’m not being brave; I’m just telling the truth. I’ve been over this many times already.’

‘Hmm. Tell me, do you believe in ghosts, Karel?’

‘Ghosts? No. That wasn’t twisted into my mind. I’m not superstitious. We weren’t superstitious in Turing City.’

‘We aren’t superstitious in Artemis, either. We don’t need to be. We just believe in iron and the forge. But up here, up in the north, it seems that things are different. They twist the minds of the robots up here to look for patterns in everything. The snow blows down the valley and they look for a death. The day moon casts a shadow over the sun and they look for the coming of a stranger. They twist suspicion into the metal of their children’s minds and think nothing of it.’

Why is he telling me this?
wondered Karel.
Why does the leader of the Artemisian army want a lowly train driver to know this?

‘No wonder all the ghost stories come from the north,’ continued Kavan. ‘It is in their nature to believe in such things.’

‘Oh.’

‘But that makes
me
suspicious,’ said Kavan. ‘When I hear about what happened to the troops that were being carried on your train, it makes me think about war. Do you know, Karel, that one’s tactics reflect one’s philosophy? In Turing City you hid behind your supposed superiority of mind, and behind your City Guard with their superior bodies. Artemis has been so successful because we know that Nyro’s philosophy transcends the metal of our minds. And now we meet a state where the robots look for patterns in the night, and they attempt to fight us in that manner . . .’

‘I can’t help you,’ said Karel, impatiently. ‘I’ve told you all that I know.’

The slightest of pauses.

‘I’ve heard of you, Karel. Even before I entered Turing City, I had heard of you. Not by name, as such, but through the story of the robot with the hidden mind.’

‘Every robot’s mind is hidden.’

‘To a certain extent, yes. But there is something special about your mind. It is almost the embodiment of the fight between our states.’

‘There is no fight. Artemis has won.’

‘So we have. And I wonder how you feel about that?’

‘You killed my son. You took my wife from me. How do you think I feel?’

‘A true Artemisian would not care. Are you a true Artemisian, Karel?’

Karel was silent.

‘No reply? Not that I expected one. Well, we leave soon to head further north. Another kingdom to conquer. And then what, Karel, and then what? What would you do if you were in my position?’

The voice was soft, almost as if he were genuinely interested in Karel’s reply. Karel waited a moment before he gave it. ‘Well, I suppose, if I were you, if I had the chance, I would . . .’

‘Yes?’ asked Kavan. ‘Yes?’

‘I would crush my own coil and have done with it.’

Karel heard Kavan laughing loudly as he broke the connection.

Kavan

The torture chair sat in the middle of the stone room. It was quite ingenious in its own way: a little bowl into which the twisted metal of a mind was placed, a little hole for the coil to poke through and to be plugged into the taut wires that stretched down the chair’s arms and back. Wires like electromuscle that could then be plucked and strummed like a lute, and the delicious pain of feedback sent playing through the coil into the mind itself. An exquisite device, thought Kavan, and indicative of the minds of the robots that had inhabited this kingdom. A device entirely contradictory to Nyro’s philosophy, for it was not the Artemisian way to treat a mind as anything more than so much twisted metal.

The prisoner that Eleanor brought into the room still wore her original body: she had not yet donned the standard grey body of an Artemisian infantryrobot. She looked at the torture chair and wriggled her fingers slowly in fear.

‘Ignore it,’ said Eleanor. ‘This is Kavan. Tell him about the Kingdom of the North. You say you have been there.’

‘Once,’ said the prisoner. She was small, her legs too short in proportion to her body, her arms too long. Kavan had seen the locals climb the mountainsides, seen how they would fall forwards to scamper up on all fours. Idly, he had wondered if he should get some of his troops to adopt that same design for fighting in this terrain. He dismissed the thought for the moment: it would be something to discuss later with the forges of Artemis City, when and if he returned there.

The prisoner relaxed a little. She now ignored the chair and adopted the storytelling pose that Kavan had seen other northern robots assume.

‘Once,’ she began, ‘when I was younger, I did travel to the edge of the North Kingdom. Back then, that same year, my kingdom had harvested much wood from the western slopes, so we had a surfeit of timber that we wished to trade before it could rot.’

Kavan glanced at Wolfgang, standing silent at the prisoner’s side. His aide had explained it earlier, but Kavan still thought it strange, the northern habit of relying on organic life as a construction material or a source of fire.